Twitter Turns 7, Boasts 200 Million Users
It’s Twitter’s seventh birthday, and the social network has two reasons to celebrate: It’s also reached its 200 million active user milestone.
Twitter is now boasting some big user numbers, a 60 million user bump since last year. Now 400 million tweets are being sent per day.
Twitter has come a long way since Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, published the first tweet “just setting up my Twitter” back in 2006. It started out as a microblogging site by Dorsey and co-founders, Florian Webb, Noah Glass, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone who could never have imagined the cultural, business, and societal impact that Twitter would have on Internet users today. There are some details surrounding the founding of Twitter (then Twttr) that are hotly contested. Some of its co-founders aren’t even recognized for their role with building out the foundation of Twitter, back when it was just a side project at once doomed and now defunct podcasting company Odeo.
However, Twitter has also played a more serious role; for many people, it helped shape global events such as the Arab Spring and the responses to the 2010 Haiti earthquake and 2011 Japanese tsunami.
Top Twitter moments also include: Barack Obama’s tweet after winning his second presidency, the first off-Earth message from the International Space Station and, more recently, the coverage of the papacy – when activity reached an astonishing 130,000 tweets per minute during the announcement of the new Pope.
Today Twitter released this video to commemorate its seventh birthday.
